Programatica 2010 after thoughts

27th November 2010

Yes, I’ve attended one more conference Programatica 2010, this one was axed on programming. It started with some interesting to not so interesting presentations of the partners. What I’ve loved about them, was that they contrasted each-other pretty nicely to a point when it was actually funny.

I’ve observed something interesting about the big names, like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle: they’re starting to converge their developer tools to open-source inspired models. How ? Well, let’s take their presentations one by one: Oracle ADF - this is an interesting framework for developing enterprise class applications, for what I’ve seen is a set of extensions to JavaEE in the vein of the Spring Framework this is nice and all that but I don’t really like uber-complex IDE’s (they might appear to save you time but you have to learn all the intricacies of how they work, also they might have bugs so my question is: Why spend time on finding solutions to the IDE bug when I could find solutions to the actual bugs in my application ?)

Next in line: IBM Jazz open-source platform that can integrate their well-known tools (like RUP) and all those nice pre-made processes for requirements, testing, developing, artifacts management and all that but with a nice open-source twist on them while also trying to make them flexible in an Agile way. The path here its obvious, again open-source is the root of the big change, it’s an adaptation.

And lastly but not last we have Microsoft with their Azure cloud platform (I kinda like it, should scale pretty well and its not that pricey compared to the rest, of course I haven’t tested it so all that might be just gibberish) - they support open-source development in SourceForge kind of way, all the community projects are hosted there - like PHP SDK for IIS.

On Azure you can pretty much run anything from java to ruby and of course their beloved .NET. The problem with it is that if you want to run a really small app, you don’t really have a plan for that (besides trials and a free limited to 25 machine hours version), they start at 59$ or something like that, but you get 20 instances which is nice for a big app, one might guess. Also nice, is that their platform is mostly complete and somehow on par with clouds like Rackspace or Heroku.

Ok, before finishing the post, I must write about Andrian Amariei ’s speech about how programmers tend to see things and sometimes the whole world in a restricted dualistic way: black or white, 1 or 0,

“We’re being held captive between the walls of our own mind”

The thing is that the real world is made of shades of grey and not absolute truths, we must keep that in mind and wake up !